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In the interest of speed and timeliness, this story is fed directly from the Associated Press newswire and may contain spelling or grammatical errors.
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Two patients die after nurses aren't alerted
Friday August 22, 2003
LOS ANGELES (AP) Two patients at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew
Medical Center died after audio alarms on new machines monitoring
their vital signs did not alert nurses that they needed help, and
they were discovered too late to be revived.
The first patient, a 33-year-old woman, died June 30, a week
after the public hospital installed the monitoring system, the
device's manufacturer and Los Angeles County officials said
Thursday. A 52-year-old woman died two weeks later, on July 15.
State health officials began investigating the deaths after they
were notified by the hospital.
After the second death, Welch Allyn Inc., the manufacturer,
found damage to the central monitoring unit that could have caused
its speakers to malfunction, company officials said Thursday. The
company found that the first patient had been tracked by the wrong
monitor, which might have confused nurses.
The damaged unit was replaced, and the system remains in use at
the hospital. The nurses were retrained and there have been no
reported problems since, Welch Allyn officials said.
Welch Allyn reported the deaths to the FDA, which tracks the
performance of medical devices. Still, the company said it was not
sure a malfunction contributed to the deaths.
Welch Allyn spokesman Tom McCall said other signals, including
visual alerts on monitor screens and bedside audio alarms, were
working and should have signaled a problem.
The system tracks the blood pressures, heart rates, oxygen
levels and temperatures of 60 patients from a computer at a nurses'
station. Visual and audio alarms are supposed to alert nurses when
wireless bedside monitors in the patients' rooms detect problems.
John Wallace, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County Department
of Health Services, said the agency was also investigating the
deaths at the county-run facility.
Wallace said King/Drew was still using the monitors because they
were approved by the Food and Drug Administration and ``are
actually superior devices to what we had'' before. He said the
county asked for the additional training and replacement equipment.
(Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
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